The Plain Dealer’s Dan Labbe drops the ransom off at the Cleveland Scene’s office.

The olds will never figure out Twitter.

Case in point, this article posted by the Cleveland Scene, an alt-weekly that squatted on the Twitter handle of that city’s venerable daily newspaper and then sold it back to them for a bounty of beer.

It seems the North East Ohio Media Group, who owns the Cleveland Plain Dealer, decided there might just be something to this tweetiling (or whatever) that all the kids are doing these days, so they loaded up on Twitter handles that included @NEO_MediaGroup, @NEOMG_News, and @ClevelandDotCom.

Unfortunately, they forgot about their flagship during this land grab.

Upon learning from a tipster that @PlainDealer was still unspoken for, the helpful youths at the Cleveland Scene leapt into action. “We registered it this morning, mainly because we wouldn’t want it falling into the hands of anyone who would do nasty stuff with it,” they said on their website Wednesday morning. I’ll add one of these for good effect: ;)

The going rate for an old-media Twitter handle. The tall boys are a nice touch!

They mulled over what sum of riches it would take to hand the handle over to the old-media stiffs at NEOMG, and came up with the following demands: A case of Great Lakes Oktoberfest and a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. I would’ve thrown in a bag of Munchies Cheese Fix (the Super Friends of snack foods) but I guess I’m just greedy.

The bounty was paid yesterday (or overpaid, judging by the picture the Scene posted to their Facebook page) and the password for @PlainsDealer was handed over to the grown ups.

This is basically the digital version of you damn kids take this damn beer and get off my damn lawn.

Sounds like it was harmless good fun. Good on the Plains Dealer people for being good sports. When URLs were the new big thing Sacramento station KCRA found that somebody had sucked up all the likely candidates and was being a rent-seeking troll for the rights.